“I don’t think it works that way.”
“Jigger together a switchboard of Ouija boards?”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Are you teasing me, Brogan Gauge, or is this the concussion talking?”
“Just spit-balling ideas.” I glanced at the unit. “That really is a fine thing. Good magic. Good work. ”
She shifted so she could inspect it. “It’s strange.”
I hummed.
“It makes me happy. A burned out storage unit with a cheap wool illusion shouldn’t make me this happy.”
“Well, maybe it’s not the storage unit and spell that is making you happy. Maybe it’s something else.Someoneelse. I nominate me and second the nomination. I’m the thing that’s making you happy.”
She leaned into me again, her back to my chest. “This is the first time we’ve really used magic together now that you’re…here with me. I liked you being a part of casting magic. I liked creating that focus of power with you.”
“I’ve always been a part of the magic you’ve used, Lula. Even when you couldn’t see me or feel me.”
“I have always felt you.” She paused, because we hadn’t had time to talk this out, not really. We hadn’t had time to tell each other how hard it had been, going near on a hundred years together, but without each other.
“I have always been there,” I repeated. “Even when you decided to buy that creepy doll hand and sell it to Headwaters, claiming it was magic.”
“It was magic.” She turned out of my arms. “Just because you don’t like a thing doesn’t mean it isn’t magic. Powerful magic.”
“Sometimes a creepy doll hand is just a creepy doll hand,” I noted.
We started toward the van, and I was still impressed by the complete lack of smoke in the air. If I put on my logical brain and did the math on how a real physical substance could be masked by a very unreal illusion, it made my head hurt more.
It took better souls than me to understand magic’s inner gears and pulleys.
“You tuck another doll limb in your pocket for Headwaters? A foot? An elbow? Back of a knee?”
“The harmonica.”
“What harmonica?”
“I picked it up in…must have been just outside Winslow. That farm house that had burned down. It was in the floorboards.”
“Oh, you mean thecursedharmonica.”
“It’s not cursed.”
“The house burned down to the studs, Lu.”
“Bad wiring did that, not a harmonica.”
“That’s just what the harmonica wants you to think.”
That pulled a short laugh out of her, and then we were at the van.
Lawrence, in the driver’s seat, called out, “Get in. I’m going to feel a lot better once we get you two into a doctor.”
At the sound of his voice, the reminder that there was a human druid near enough to bite, all the softness and ease went out of Lu, like someone had just welded her spine. I could almost feel the micro-adjustments in her, the changes she was making so that she wouldn’t show what she was really feeling.
It wasn’t anger. It was hunger.
The faster we saw a doctor and found some unsuspecting chickens, the better.
